Normally, I find war books fairly resistible. This is certainly not the case with To War with Whitaker (Mandarin Pounds 5.99) which consists of the diaries of the amazing Countess of Ranfurly. She and her husband were both 25 when war broke out in 1939.
Naturally, he joined his regiment and (as it was a cavalry one) naturally took his hunter along. He also asked his butler, Whitaker, if he’d go, as his batman.
“The old fatty looked over the top of his spectacles and said, ‘To the war, my Lord? Very good, my Lord.’” He did go - and so did the Countess. When the authorities deported her from Palestine where the regiment was serving, she jumped ship in South Africa and tried to hire a taxi to take her back to Cairo.
She got there too and stayed in the Middle East and later Italy till the war ended. You can tell her army friends are frightfully posh because the men are called Lizzie or Pug or Jumbo, the women Puss and Toby. Coco is her parrot. It is a fascinating story in which she casually lunches with the King of Greece and stands up Eisenhower because he was rude.
Despite the Earl being taken prisoner, they had “a good war”. The fictional Major Kempe did not. He figures in “Tonya’s Story”, one of two novellas by Robin Chapman published in Wartimes (Sinclair-Stevenson Pounds 9.99). Kempe is in the real British battalion which had to sort out displaced persons in Austria in 1945. He befriends a community of Cossacks only to have to force them back to Stalin’s gulags or worse. The other story is about de Gaulle’s daughter Anne, a Down’s syndrome child, and her wartime life in Kent. Both “reconstructions” make history painfully real.
Another war is chronicled in The End of Innocence, Simon Garfield’s history of HIV and Aids in Britain (Faber Pounds 7.99). He begins with the first documented case (Manchester, 1959) and through a mixture of reportage, research and interviews he goes on to tell the whole sad, frightening, inspiring story. Frightening because of the denial and bigotry shown by politicians, clergy and some relatives; inspiring because of the courage, wit and compassion of those most closely involved (including clergy).
The flow of biographies continues unabated, some more original than others. Among the latest are James King’s detailed Virginia Woolf (Penguin Pounds 9.99); Marianne Gray’s honest portrait of the French film actress, Jeanne Moreau (La Moreau, Warner Books Pounds 7.99) and Andrew Motion’s The Lamberts (Faber Pounds 9.99). The Lamberts were an unlikely trio. George became Australia’s leading painter of his time; his son Constant was the composer and founder of Sadler’s Wells ballet - and his son, Kit, the manager of The Who, until he destroyed himself with heroin. This revealing but never prurient saga of three witty, self-destructive, tragic men does indeed seem to prove that the sins of the parents are visited upon their sons. Motion makes the point more succinctly by quoting Philip Larkin’s infamous line.
The art and craft of the biographer are revealed with some style by Richard Holmes in his autobiographical Footsteps (Flamingo Pounds 7.99). Part travelogue, part literary criticism, he retells how he has pursued his subjects: R L Stevenson, Wordsworth, Shelley and Gerard de Nerval (the man who walked the parks of Paris with a pet lobster on a leash).
Unsent Letters (Penguin Pounds 6.99) is also partly autobiographical. These are the letters Malcolm Bradbury would have liked to send to the foreign student who demands extended help with his thesis on the campus novel, to the conference organiser who mistook him for Malcolm Lowry, the unpublished novelist who encloses a lengthy first novel and the television viewer of one of his own adaptations. Repetitive if read without a break but full of very good laughs (and sound advice).
